I was advising a CEO last week, who had been bootstrapping his companies for the past 10 years but was ready to take the plunge and partner with a Venture Capitalist. He was worrying about whether a VC would be interested in him and his company, and I responded with “Dude, you are the CEO VCs dream about!”

First off, I can’t shake my California lingo, no matter how embarrassing it is for me. Secondly, I have heard bootstrapped CEOs wonder and worry if they would be attractive to VCs – I am here to tell them all that they should feel ten feet tall and confident when approaching VCs for investment.

VCs look for three things when making an investment:

Does the CEO have strong business acumen, and an ability to build a business?

Can the company grow to a meaningful revenue level, i.e. ~$50M annual revenue?

Is there a $10B market opportunity?

The hardest point, and the point most dependent on the CEO, is point number one. Bootstrapped CEOs, there is a good chance you are WAY better at #1 than 99.9% of the CEOs VCs meet that month.

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The reason goes back to an old joke – “What’s the best way to get $500 million dollars? Start with a billion.” If a CEO has unlimited resources, it is much easier to build some semblance of a business. It is the CEOs who can do a lot with a little, grow a company in a scrappy way, and go find customers to fund a business through revenue that are the special ones.

Ironically enough, the CEOs that build massive businesses think a lot like bootstrapped CEOs, even though they might have a ton of VC money. Take Atlassian co-CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes, in a thoughtfulpodcast he explains that he didn’t really need the money, but rather wanted to take care of employees. Google NEVER touched the money they raised – they had crafted a magic money making machine that spit out profits and has never stopped giving.

My old boss and mentor,Ben Nye, methodically and strategically looked for these entrepreneurs. He found two brothers in Tulsa building a business on credit cards – that company becameSolarWinds which is now valued at over $4 billion. He found a humble and brilliant CEO in Kansas City, who just so happened to be married to a rain-maker sales person – that company was Archer Technologies,acquired by EMC for hundreds of millions of dollars.

Now, once you have established credibility in the first point, it is time to prepare your pitch for items number two and three.

These are straightforward exercises. For point number two, you need to show how your current business has legs and, in a very granular way, you can expand your current business to one that is bigger. The goal here is to show the logical potential to grow 50-100% for the next few years. To be clear, growing 50-100% is no easy feat. However, if you have bootstrapped to date, you probably have been funded by customers - i.e. revenue. To help show this, rank order every customer from ‘most attractive’ to ‘least attractive.’ Your criteria could be revenue per year, customer satisfaction, etc. - your pick. Then, for each customer think about what attributes they have - i.e. what industry, what size of company, type of customers they serve. For each customer, try to think of 10-100 customers like that customer, but not a current customer of yours.

In this exercise, be creative! Look for adjacent market, look at companies large and small. The goal is to show how a larger business is just one or two degrees of separation away.

Then, when talking to a VC, show how many customers you currently have, how much on average they currently pay, then do a pipeline review and a qualified lead review showing that with more salespeople you can grow 50-100%+ for the next few years. You can show how this will take some money, but not a ton. Most importantly, your logic needs to be rock solid.

For point number three, this is where the VC is going to test whether you can think big. You can make assumptions and take liberties - show that you can dream and have that dream based on market evolutions. Have a unique point of view that you have gained through your experience so far. Now, there is a problem of taking too aggressive liberties, or pitching something that you don’t actually believe in, and I will cover that pitfall in a future post.

In other future posts, I will go deep on points two and three, but the most important takeaway is to be proud you bootstrapped, and know that VCs will be excited to meet you because you have shown capability in the hardest aspect of building a business – actually building a business.

This blog features contributors who don’t write regularly for Forbes but who have timely insight on starting, running and building businesses.